—this Ḥanafī, following the lead of his own Ḥanafī shaykhs, in his hostility toward the hadith scholars at large and toward al-Bukhārī and Muslim in particular, can be recognized only by someone who has examined their writings or their marginal notes on the works of others. I have already cited a few samples of this—by which I mean al-Kawtharī and al-Kawtharī’s disciple—and, among the fresh proofs I have uncovered, is that very introduction to which I alluded earlier, which this unfair partisan has lately republished and annotated.

That, then, is the precise purport of my words: they relate only to some of this partisan’s Ḥanafī teachers. Yet see how he twisted my phrase “his Ḥanafī shaykhs” into “the Ḥanafī shaykhs,” a distortion that erases the limiting pronoun so the statement can no longer be understood in the narrow sense I intended. Who, one wonders, is accustomed to such alteration and tampering?

A list of the points on which we branded Abū Ghuddah with ignorance of this noble science, of his agitation against its servant, and of his false accusations—points about which he has kept silent in his “Errors and Fabrications”:

1 – He objected to my expression “Ṣaḥīḥ, agreed upon,” on the grounds that it combines a grading of authenticity with attribution to the two Ṣaḥīḥs. Driven by whim, he erected upon that basis whatever false charges he pleased, declaring in his ignorance: “He has produced something unprecedented by earlier or later scholars!” I then demonstrated to him that the very wording he condemned is the practice of the ḥāfiẓ al-Baghawī and the critic al-Dhahabī.

2 – He took exception to my statement regarding certain narrators, “I do not know him.” I proved to him that this is a well-known convention among the hadith specialists, and I supplied numerous examples of the same phrase from his own words in one of his prefaces!